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The reflexive social media mantra of “mental illness doesn’t generate bigotry” is utterly disconnected from how every Jew I know has processed these events. Which is basically, “Oh look, Kanye’s crazy ass is rambling about the Jews. Should’ve listened to that Jewish doctor and taken his meds.”

Yair Rosenberg’s take was best: Sometimes people with psychiatric conditions get paranoid and conspiratorial, and when they do, it’s easier to latch onto a conspiratorial template that’s been around for thousands of years than invent your own conspiracy about, say, the Amish or Copts or a cabal of personal trainers. So of COURSE his mental illness is relevant and of COURSE societal antisemitism is also relevant. If you can’t acknowledge that, you’re neither a friend to the mentally ill nor the Jews.

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My least favorite argument about this is the following broken syllogism: mental illness doesn’t create impulses, only lowers your inhibitions, so any actions a mentally ill person takes were already things they “wanted to do.” Freddie already perfectly explains why this is absurd, but it’s also hiding the more subtle yet more absurd claim that being a good person is about never having bad impulses. Everyone has bad impulses! It is part of the human condition to have prejudiced thoughts, or to want to say something mean, or to judge quickly and harshly. Being a good person is basically entirely having the control to refrain from your bad impulses. If you didn’t have to refrain, what is your goodness derived from? It speaks to a profound arrogance among all the online moralists that they have no bad thoughts, that even if they were severely mentally ill they would never utter a bad word. That all mental illness does is reveal the Good people and the Bad people, and you already know which side they feel confident they’re on.

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"She quotes psychiatry resident Amanda Joy Calhoun as saying, 'Many people exist who have mental illnesses and are not racist or offensive. I work with many of them.'

This is no less stupid than saying "many cats are grey, therefore no cats are orange." If her grasp of elementary logic is that bad, every educational institution that accredited her should probably be bulldozed, starting with her elementary school. What an idiot.

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Oct 31, 2022Liked by Freddie deBoer

And the dangerous thing here is that the least resourced people bear the brunt of the logical conclusion to this dynamic. I did a vlog thing about a homeless guy who hit a woman in the head with a rock and the hosts smirked at me the whole time for suggesting we should invest in treatment facilities where people can actually get care and the right drugs. Roughly one million people told me they hope my mother gets hit in the head with a rock or that I should let the guy move into my apartment

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Oct 31, 2022Liked by Freddie deBoer

I find I want to stick up a little for the white PMC woman with ADHD and anxiety who always ends up the punching bag in these discussions, though I have complained about her plenty myself in the past. This is tangential to the central argument of Freddie’s post, which I agree with and always appreciate seeing articulated, but that woman is invoked both in the post and several times in the comments.

I think she’s become a little too easy a loathsome figure to reach for, a little too stale as a counterpoint to someone with *real* problems. I have met the kind of person who the stereotype is referencing, many times; I also don’t like what a cardboard cutout she’s become to people with a (legitimate!) axe to grind. Yeah, it’s maddening that her caricature gets online all the time and sanctimoniously lectures us about our moral responsibility to people with problems which, we assume, she’ll never comprehend the true scope of. She’s also not personally withholding state funding for inpatient medical care.

This isn’t to say there’s anything wrong with striking back against the vapid, reductive narrative Freddie describes, or that that narrative isn’t horribly pervasive. I’m just pointing out that the face of the hypothetical person producing the narrative has become too much a go-to target for derision, much as the hypothetical saintly, suffering, anti-racist mentally ill person has become a target for veneration on the other side.

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The “mentally ill people are less likely to commit acts of violence” thing — to the extent it has any support at all — is I suspect due to exactly the phenomenon you’re talking about here. Most “mentally ill people” are quite high-functioning, and indeed many may be over-diagnosed or self-diagnosed. And accurate diagnosis, over-diagnosis, and self-diagnosis are all more likely to occur among educated, well-off urban professionals with excellent access to health care. If you lump all the lawyers and doctors and graphic designers and editors who have (or claim to have) social anxiety or ADHD or mild depression in the same bucket as homeless paranoid psychotics, yes, you’re going to get a population that is mostly nonviolent and high-functioning — and maybe even more so than the average population, because they will skew rich and white and female, which is to say the statistically least violent.

In other words, it’s entirely possible to construct a set of “the mentally ill” that gives you the statistic you want for the talking point, but it’s a pointless statistic. A little like saying that most people who catch a virus don’t die and then using that obvious fact to argue that Ebola isn’t particularly dangerous.

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"I’d like to ask why it’s so hard for people to understand that there's a difference between avoiding stigmatizing people and treating them as blameless angels."

I think there's something basically broken in human cognition on this issue. Things can be good or bad, and (especially in activism world) there are never any negative consequences for destigmatizing behavior.

The place where this was most tangible to me (maybe because I worked on the issue and knew some of the activists) was sex work decriminalization - it wasn't enough to say that people should be free to do with their own bodies, sex workers also needed to be heroes who know the reality of sex and relationships in a way that is mere non-professional-sex-havers ever could, etc.

Or with cannabis reform - it's not enough to say marijuana is safer than alcohol and it shouldn't be illegal, you have to claim cannabis is going to cure cancer and every other disease.

People are very uncomfortable with ambiguity, and it creates incentives for them to flatten and simplify complex problems into simple morality plays.

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It can be morally correct that Kanye West suffered professional consequences for his behavior AND factually correct that this behavior was caused by his mental illness. That's why mental illness is an illness: because it can cause negative consequences for you!

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I was almost sick to my stomach watching the Today Show this morning as everyone blah blah on about how the guy that assaulted Polsi’s husband was influenced by some MAGA influences. What a fucking crock of shit. As someone who has run psychiatric hospital units for 35 years I can tell you a guy that frequently calls the police on his neighbors because he thinks their spying on him or stands in the street naked or disappears for years an shoots up fentanyl is psychotic. He is not a political actor he is very sick and needs help.

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similarly, the guy that attacked paul pelosi was also severely mentally ill. the glib version of this was "read the dude's blog, he's cuckoo for cocoa puffs" while the serious version was "the journalists that tracked down his friends and family." like yeah, he had qanon on there, but he's had basically every conceivable conspiracy theory that's happened over the course of his entire life on there, that's just the most recent one to have occured

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Dealing with mentally ill clients is consistently the most emotionally taxing part of my job as a public defender. There's no polite society filter, I get to meet and interact with the absolute dregs. The scenarios where one's life is unraveled and rendered absolutely destitute. The client that has made me cry the most was a woman with bipolar disorder nearing her 50s. She was constantly homeless and constantly cycling in and out of jail. She rarely exercised medication compliance on her own, and so her time at liberty was often the time when she was completely manic and experiencing florid delusions.

She was perpetually, by her telling, the victim of a grand conspiracy against her, usually instigated by her ex or some random celebrity. The conspiracy involved various groups and organizations stalking and surveilling her, and she fought back to defend herself. In practice, this meant she assaulted random people on the street who happened to be at the wrong place and time. She'd call me from jail, completely decompensated, begging me to find a way to get her released because her ex-husband had infiltrated the jail and paid the guards to rape her. Rape was something she reported to me constantly, sometimes it was wizards, sometimes doctors, sometimes jail guards. I knew she was homeless and clearly vulnerable to sexual assault, but I also knew her grasp on reality was tenuous at best. It killed me to discount her allegations.

She never could maintain a phone but she had my number memorized and so she'd ask strangers to use their phone to call me. I'd get calls from unknown numbers at all hours of the day, and I never knew what I was in for. Sometimes she'd call me and ask me to pick her up because some vampires had her surrounded. She'd tell me that her ex planted a nuclear bomb in her gums and how she spent all day trying to find a doctor to remove the bomb, but no one would believe her. She'd start sobbing, asking why nobody believed her. Sometimes she'd say she was standing at the edge of a bridge ready to jump off because she was tired of running.

Her hallucinations may have been fake, but her distress was completely real. As much as I am morally opposed to incarceration, I breathed a sigh of relief when she was in jail. I knew she'd take her medication, under threat of force if necessary, and within a week she'd stabilize and be back to her genial charming and coherent self. I knew she'd be relatively stable so long as she's held behind bars. She wouldn't be able to hurt anyone, thinking they were shapeshifters pretending to be her children, and she wouldn't hurt herself. The laundry list of unexplained injuries marked on her body would cease accumulating. She wouldn't be calling me from the edge of a railing.

I was so happy she was in jail, and I hated myself for feeling that way, and for not being able to come up with a better solution.

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I legitimately don’t understand why people think that it’s not in the realm of possibility for someone to have a racist delusion and not necessarily believe it. My brother believed that I was an incarnation of Hitler and possibly an alien when he was in the throes of his first psychotic break. I mean, I don’t know why he believed what he believed but like assuming that he had control over it it’s like just a extremely bizarre thing. I think I’ve stated it before that important forensic mental health And it’s incredibly frustrating how simplistic the discourse about it is. There’s a relationship between mental health and criminal justice that is pretty complex but nobody in the main stream seems like they want to go there because of everything that the article states. For some reason mental health is this weird quirky identity and not the reality of what actually happens.

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Oct 31, 2022·edited Oct 31, 2022

Humans in the West highly prize victim status, even to the point where they cultivate their own victimhood and that of those around them. This is allows the cultivator to bask in the reflected glory of the victim, and also affords opportunities for moral preening, by showing one's affirmation of right sort of victim.

At the same time, some victim categories are more equal than others. Humans use up inordinate amounts of time assigning relative weights to victim categories, i.e., burning questions such as "is a three headed alcoholic white cishet lesbian worth more Wokemon points than a bisexual male native-identified two spirit furry?"

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This resonated with me. Anyone who has ever befriended or loved someone with a severe mental illness will know exactly what you mean. It's terrible, debilitating, life ruining stuff that doesn't care one iota about social mores or the dictums of political correctness.

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I have to say Freddie, reading you the last couple of years has opened and changed my mind profoundly about the subject of mental illness. Something that I had little experience with.

I have said similar things to some close friends about Kanye in the last week, though not as eloquently. Compassion should always be the goal even and especially when consequences are part of the actions a mentally ill person takes. Keep writing brother and I'll be here to read it.

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